The process of advertising involves presenting advertising messages for a cause, such as the purchase of a product or service, to people. Advertising messages can be presented via a variety of channels, including television, print periodicals, postal mail, billboards, web pages, and electronic mail.
Depending upon the type of channel used for particular advertising and the specific technology that supports that channel, advertising may be targeted at different levels to specific people or groups of people. For example, in some cases, advertising presented on web pages can be targeted to specific people or groups of people.
Targeting advertising to particular people can provide advantages, including (1) increasing the average level of relevancy of an advertising message to the people that receive it, (2) ensuring that the advertising message is seen by the people most likely to be receptive to it, and (3) reducing the total cost of advertising by reducing the number of people to whom the message is presented. One approach to targeting advertising is population segmentation, in which groups of people are created that have common characteristics, and that are likely to be receptive to advertising messages directed to particular subjects.
Conventional approaches to defining segments within a population of people begin by collecting a body of profile information about each person in the population, such as information characterizing the person's web browsing activity, as well as other demographic or biographical information for the person. A user builds a query against this profile information, which is executed to identify the people in the segment, referred to as “populating” the segment.
While such conventional approaches to defining segments can often be completely effective at selecting the people intended by the user defining the segment, they are often difficult to use. Such a user must understand all of the information available in the profiles, understand the set of tests available in the query engine, and understand how to assemble these into a query. This process often requires the use of a fairly involved user interface. As a result, such conventional approaches are typically used only by a small number of very sophisticated users, and are very seldom used by users—such as front-line marketing and advertising personnel—who have the greatest capacity to identify and refine characteristics likely to make a person receptive to a particular cause or advertising message.
In view of the shortcomings of conventional segment definition techniques, a new approach to segment definitions that enabled a larger group of users to more easily and/or more effectively define segments of users who are interested in a particular subject would have significant utility.